Have you considered the correlation between how well you manage your lubrication program and safety? On the surface, the two may not appear to have anything to do with one another, but they are linked in more ways than you might think.

What if you could decrease the frequency of your oil changes, your equipment didn't break down, and you didn't have to lose sales revenue? Wouldn't you want to adopt practices that accomplished all this?

Equipment reliability, often measured in terms of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), lies at the heart of automotive manufacturing and its processes rely on precise, repeatable operation to achieve the surface finishes, part integrity, and cycle times needed. Most automotive manufacturers are realizing that maintaining clean oil is one of the best investments it can make, with contamination at the core of premature machinery failure and diminished lubricant life.

Lubricant cleanliness can be increased through the improvement of your storage and handling program. By improving storage and handling, you can eliminate the ingression of contaminants into new lubricants and therefore eliminate ingression of contaminants into a component through new lubricant additions.

For many years, plants have treated maintenance budgets as a cost generating line item, and as we all know when profits need to be maximized the easiest and quickest solution is to decrease spending rather looking to increase revenue. When we view something as solely a cost, our impulse is to keep it small or shrink it. This impulse can prove even costlier in the long run.